Don't get me wrong: clearly unjust laws exist and there exist situations where resistance is the moral thing to do. I just find it terrifying how quickly people jump to saying it'd be appropriate for obscenely powerful companies like Google to make up their own legal system and pick and choose which laws apply to them.
(Disclaimer: Google employee / American citizen, find both orgs frightening)
These protests are in large part about Russian citizens reasserting their constitutional rights both to participate in elections (as currently all the opposition candidates to Moscow municipal elections have been denied access to elections, and many of them have been arrested) and to their right of unarmed protest and demonstration (Articles 32 and 31 respectively of Russian constitution).
In this regard, the claim of the protesters (disputed, of course, by Russian government) is that their actions are explicitly legal under Russian law, and instead the actions of the Russian government in forbidding this protest and arresting participants are illegal and violate the constitution. The argument is that these restrictions to assemble and protest don't have to be obeyed by anyone - citizens or Google - as they're unconstitutional and can't be valid law.
https://qz.com/890689/what-us-protestors-can-and-cannot-do-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_assembly_in_Russia
I’m not saying the law is good. But if it does exist, and people don’t obey it, they are indeed doing something illegal.
In truth, there is a kind of Grand Unified Law, of which we are still working out the details, which we (whether we realize it or not) want companies to follow. It is law based on ethics and morality, and no legal infrastructure in any country today is entirely accommodating of this law.
The fact is that we live in a world full of corrupt politics, and most of the time when companies have to "play ball" with requests such as censorship, it's a bad thing. We are working on the GUL but we do know that it includes freedom of speech.
This is very separate from things like regulations and safety measures, which are obviously in place for a reason and which would also exist in this hypothetical GUL.
You simply cannot break it down as "sometimes you want them to follow the law and sometimes you don't", because the law is imperfect and does not currently reflect the best case scenario. I would resist censorship in another country and I expect Google, et al. to do the same on the basis of putting ethics before money.
But then you're saying that you think that companies like Google are morally equipped to be able to determine this law better than states would, which I think is where you lose me. Legal systems are also imperfect but at least there is oversight and (at least symbolic) input from citizens.
What makes you believe that such Law exists at all? Or that we mortal humans or our organizations such as Google are computationally equipped to make correct decisions in accordance to such Law? Or that such Law is compatible with Western liberal morals? These are all very contentious propositions.
BTW someone on the Internet is writing a book on this and related topics which is long, rambling and unfinished but still very thought-provoking and interesting. Here is a section (unfortunately, unfinished) on this exact problem: https://meaningness.com/ethical-eternalism
Something like a Golden Rule?
(Something common to numerous major religious, jumping in before the critics....)
Companies are unethical and immoral anyway, so this doesn't work.
They decide that for themselves already and are fined routinely for this.
There's still situations where the nobles reign. Nothing they have really matches the flexibility that merchants do when wielding their power.
People are appealing to power when they ask that google disobey a country's sovereignty. It's probably a misappraisal of google's power in Russia. Google is neck and neck in search with Yandex. It's hard to wield a stranglehold you don't have.
In America, google is having lots of success positioning itself as the prime broker for commerce.
Amazon's trying to build a tower that subsumes commerce with depth vs. google's breadth. EC2 is attacking search's foundation from the other side.
If you host the majority of content, you have territorial advantages and ways you can undermine google's usefulness. The amazon market is their flank attack. If everything you want is in one place, no need to search.
Facebook tries to be the ultimate broker of human relationships, and maintain de-facto control over downstream commerce from that high hill.
The government has a de jure monopoly on use of force, but how useful is that against controlling relationships, and therefore elections -- or commerce, and therefore the economy? The government looks outmatched to me.
It makes sense the peasants, yeoman and burghers would address their geopolitical wishes to those with actionable global soft power.
This is just the latest example.
As always there will be tons of misdirection to hide the sources and overstating of the impact of foreign boogiemen for political points and justification of new information controls. It’s a tactic as old as politics.
No, the US have supported and promoted dozens of coups and dictators. The phrase you're looking for is not "pro democracy", it's "aligned with the US interests".
After a certain point, simply due to the number of people on your platform, you become someone to be influenced / controlled / watched out for / a target / a friend / an enemy.
And other control brokers, large and small, will try to influence you. (And - to a degree - you can't escape it, you will be influenced. Now you have to counter it, embrace it, ignore it, understand it, downplay it, dodge it, amplify it, etc.)
Size (of potential influence) makes organizations, platforms, people targets, not "gatekeeping".
There was a time when I would expect Google to stick to its principles and say no. Nowadays, I'm not so sure.
In a small number of cases when the authorities really don't want you to organize a protest, they'll keep denying you one location after the other using bullshit excuses until the date when the protest is set to happen. Then they can crack it down for "unlawful assembly".
Note that I'm not from Russia, but I am from a country that looks up to Russia for some forsaken reason and we have experienced protests getting killed in this fashion.
Correction #1: from a town administration, not a police.
Correction #2: the actual legal state of a non-permitted demonstration is fuzzy because while the right for it is given by the Constitution, organizers and any violations of "peace and unarmed" way could be penalized due to federal laws which are stated applicable by the same Constitution.
Even if one ignores the obvious Russia-specific answer, there are plenty of reasons for a protest to be illegal in more western states. Normally it would be illegal to assemble on private land without permission, for example. And there are often laws requiring protests to eg seek permission for a planned route and stick to it (though these may not necessarily be enforced).
I can’t imagine advertising assemblies without permits is illegal in many democracies?
31. Citizens of the Russian Federation shall have the right to assemble peacefully, without weapons, hold rallies, meetings and demonstrations, marches and pickets.
Article 29
1. Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of ideas and speech.
2. The propaganda or agitation instigating social, racial, national or religious hatred and strife shall not be allowed. The propaganda of social, racial, national, religious or linguistic supremacy shall be banned.
3. No one may be forced to express his views and convictions or to reject them.
4. Everyone shall have the right to freely look for, receive, transmit, produce and distribute information by any legal way. The list of data comprising state secrets shall be determined by a federal law.
5. The freedom of mass communication shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be banned.
PS. Im Russian and live here.
1- [In Russian] http://www.consultant.ru/cons/cgi/online.cgi?rnd=91E57842AD2...
2- https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/default.aspx?p...
> Tens of thousands of Russians staged what observers called the country’s biggest political protest for eight years on Saturday, defying a crackdown to demand free elections to Moscow’s city legislature.
> The watchdog, Roscomnadzor, said Russia would consider it interference in its sovereign affairs and a hostile influence should Google fails to respond to the request.
If Google still follows "Don't be evil", it will respond with the equivalent of a middle finger. I hope someone there still thinks Enlightenment values are more important than kowtowing to a repressive government.
Now suppose Russia already has a history of meddling in US internal affairs and funding coups within the US, will Russian youtube with videos on US protests be really even allowed to operate here? Would anyone here even be making arguments about democracy, freedom and enlightenment?
There is always a kind of dissonance and double standards in these discussions. You can't let the harassment and persecution of whistle blowers like Assange, Snowden, Manning, the protestors at Standing Rock and immigrant activists and other brazen attacks on democracy go unchallenged and then claim to be 'concerned' about democracy in far off Russia or China. That is politics, not concern for values.
These values if they are to have any meaning can only apply to actions not actors, and using them to to demonize some and excuse others renders them meaningless, and in many ways this has already happened with the widespread abuse of human rights and democracy by some to achieve other objectives.
Even in a 'federate it out to one per country that follows its laws' would become rapidly problematic if linkage to the 'main' company. Google couldn't just set up say a Google-Iran following Iranian laws without violating sanctions.
I'm not sure if there either a 'good' universal answer or one which is widely liked. The easiest and most controlling would be a radical 'ban international business' - it would make the domains clearer but would be a bad idea. Extraterritorality would be a 'technical' solution but would also come with so many problems it isn't funny makes the previous bad idea look good in comparison.
Internet and enforcibility complicate matters further - even if they formalized say a "free to host to everywhere but not to monetize".
Given how the Russians are obviously meddling in elections around the world using hacking and disinformation campaigns, I don't think they really have any leg to stand on here. Their acceptance of flagrantly violating laws in other countries means that really the US, through Google, should be trying to meddle inside Russia to advocate for opposition parties and Democratic/civil society institutions. If the West could effectively organize mass anti-Putin protests and scare him, it seems beneficial in a world where his meddling has gone relatively unanswered except for sanctions.
Especially if our answer was "we" will focus on disseminating accurate information and supporting free speech, countering both authoritarianism and disinformation campaigns, it would become a brighter line of differing world philosophies and give some moral foundation in its connection to Western liberalism. It would be meddling through its support of individual rights, free expression, freedom to assemble, supporting free elections. It's similar to giving political asylum to persecuted opposition leaders who stand for liberalism and democracy and then amplifying their message from exile.
We should enshrine this support of such rights into some NGOs and international treaties (many of which we already have) that Democratic societies could sign and then multinational corporations would have a standard of international law to follow. Then instead of corporations having to choose which laws to follow, they would have more clarity through following international law.
And obviously there is a massive slippery slope in everything I just proposed.
It's like how the Bretton Woods Conference after WWII established the World Bank and the IMF to push a western global paradigm for how we think economic development, which entrenched a markets based system over a communist system. I think developing some new organizations / treaties that then help align how all these multinationals and Western governments work together in an era of the internet to push for certain rights, would be a net positive, while fraught proposition.
Right now massive amounts of power are being consolidated into a handful of internet companies, and that power is being manipulated to sow discord and disinformation to the benefit mostly of authoritarian regimes. We could way more effectively use this power to fight those regimes and begin to play offense instead of only defense.
